The shifting issue content of left–right identification: cohort differences in Western Europe

Abstract

Over the last decades, the rising salience of new issues has transformed politics in Western Europe. How has this transformation affected citizens’ left–right identities? This study shows how new issues have become integrated into the meaning of left–right among Western Europeans through generational replacement. Mechanisms of political socialisation and elite cue taking imply that how strongly an issue is associated with left–right identities should reflect this issue’s politicisation during a cohort’s formative years. In line with this, an analysis of the European Social Survey for 12 Western European countries from 2002 to 2018 reveals that environmental protection and immigration attitudes are more strongly associated with left–right positions among those born later. Attitudes towards redistribution tend to be less relevant within more recent cohorts in some countries, though period effects after the European debt crisis point in the opposite direction. This study enhances our understanding of the evolution of political conflict.

Keywords:

• Age-period-cohort analysis
• generational change
• left–right identification
• political socialisation
• realignment

Acknowledgements

Previous versions of this article were presented at JGU Mainz in April 2021, at the EPSA conference in June 2021, the DVPW conference in September 2021 and the MZES colloquium in September 2021. I am grateful for the many helpful comments received on these occasions. Special thanks for providing particularly detailed and helpful comments go to Kai Arzheimer, Denis Cohen, Sven Hillen, Sigrid Roßteutscher, Rosalind Shorrocks and WEP’s two anonymous reviewers. I am also very grateful to two former M.A. students of mine – Max Andorff-Woller and Lutz Ickstadt – as this research was partly inspired by a term paper they wrote under my supervision in 2018.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I thereby follow an understanding of party-level issue politicisation as being the joint product of issue salience and issue polarization (see, e.g., Hutter and Kriesi 2022).

2 Respondents who answered ‘don’t know’ are excluded, following this contribution’s focus on the issue correlates of left–right orientations among those who hold such an orientation. For research on why respondents do (not) hold left–right orientations, see Otjes and Rekker (2021), who also emphasize political socialization. In all countries studied here, the share of ‘don’t know’ responses is below a fifth (see Figure A1 in the online appendices).

3 The decision to use all nine ESS waves forces me to use those single items consistently included. Only in the case of immigration attitudes would it have been possible to combine several items. For reasons of consistency, I took a single item in this case as well. A factor built from several immigration items correlates highly with this item (over 0.8) and using it instead leads to similar main findings (see Figure C1 in the online appendices).

4 Controlling for education as an interactive confounder is important because, first, left–right positions are more strongly associated with issue attitudes the higher an individual’s level of education (Inglehart and Klingemann 1976; Lesschaeve 2017). Second, individuals in more recent cohorts tend to hold higher levels of formal education (see Table A1 in the online appendices for a cross-tabulation). Thus, we might see stronger associations between issue attitudes and left–right positions among more recent cohorts just because these tend to be more educated. Equation (1)(1) $${\mathit{\text{lr}}}_i={{\beta }_1{\mathit{\text{cohort}}}_i+\beta }_{2j}{\mathit{\text{issue}}}_{\mathit{\text{ij}}}+{\beta }_{3j}{\mathit{\text{issue}}}_{\mathit{\text{ij}}}{\mathit{\text{cohort}}}_i+{\gamma }_1{Z}_i+{\gamma }_{2j}{\mathit{\text{issue}}}_{\mathit{\text{ij}}}{Z}_i+{\delta }_1{X}_i+{\mu }_k{+\alpha }_{\mathit{\text{kt}}}+{ϵ}_i$$(1) adjusts for education to get at a ‘pure’ cohort effect that is informative about the effects of political socialization.

5 Age, or life-cycle, effects would mean that associations between issue attitudes and left–right positions regularly change over the life course. It is not apparent why life-cycle experiences should affect the issue basis of left–right positions (cf. Rekker 2016: 125), yet it cannot be ruled out on theoretical grounds. In the cumulated ESS data, the relatively short observation period of 16 years introduces high collinearity between cohorts and age: 86% of the variance in age (in years) is accounted for by cohort membership. I thus use a rough distinction of age groups that keeps collinearity with cohorts at an acceptable, while inevitably high, level (see Table A1 in the online appendices for a cross-tabulation).

6 Figure 1 also shows that more recent cohorts are more open to immigration and more tolerant of homosexuality, in line with theories of generational value change (Inglehart 1977; Norris and Inglehart 2019). Despite this, there remains sufficient variation in attitudes within cohorts (see Figure A2 in the online appendices).

7 Figure B1 in the online appendices presents conditional effects by levels of education, showing that all four issue attitudes are much more strongly related to left–right orientations for those with higher levels of formal education. This is in line with previous research (cf. Inglehart and Klingemann 1976; Lesschaeve 2017) and vindicates the rationale for adjusting for education.

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Nils D. Steiner

Nils D. Steiner is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Political Science, JGU Mainz. He studies political processes in advanced democracies from a comparative perspective, with a focus on the political attitudes and the political behaviour of citizens in Western Europe. His articles have appeared in journals such as British Journal of Political Science, European Journal of Political Research, and Journal of European Public Policy.